Chapter Twenty-three

A Workers’ MP On A Workers’ Wage: Coventry
And Liverpool

FAR weightier matters than a Labour Party
witch-hunt were, however, on the minds of workers in the first part of
1983.

In Liverpool, for instance, the Liberal/Tory controlled city council
had decided to turn over refuse collection and street sweeping to private
contractors. A mass campaign - "The Campaign against Privatisation"
- launched by the manual workers led by Branch 5 of the GMBATU was a
model; it both informed the workforce and prepared them for battle.

The stewards decided to call a mass meeting. This
was then followed by a decision calling for an all-out strike by all
council workers to coincide with the council meeting called to make the
decision on privatisation.

The majority of the workforce voted in favour
of strike action. On 27 April 1983, just before the Council elections,
20,000 city council workers struck in response to the Joint Shop Stewards
Committee’s call for action against privatisation.

Thousands lobbied the
council’s Finance Committee meeting. Their anger was directed at Liberal
leader Trevor Jones, who was virtually mobbed. He was only able to enter
the meeting after the intervention of shop stewards. Faced with an all-out
indefinite strike ten days before the local elections, Trevor Jones backed
down.

At the council meeting, when the Tories moved the
privatisation proposal, the Liberals voted with Labour to beat the Tories!
Trevor Jones’s intention was to bide his time, work for victory in the
May elections and then to recommence an all-out offensive against the
workers. He was severely disappointed. Labour romped to victory on the
basis of a radical fighting socialist programme. Jones then declared:
"It [the election result] will eventually lead to the overthrow of
free society as we know it." (1)

Labour had held on to all its seats and gained
eleven others at the expense of the Liberals and the Tories. The Labour
vote increased by 40 per cent. Yet the Liberal’s election campaign
consisted mainly of smear tactics directed against Militant supporters in
the Labour Party. Following the victory Tony Mulhearn declared: "The
nonsense of the Rolls-Royce, gold chain, and coach and horses is not
needed in Liverpool... possibly the gold chain will be put in a museum
along with the defeated Liberals". (2)

22,000 more Liverpudlians had voted for Labour
because of its programme of "no privatisation, a £2 rent cut, no
spending cuts, a massive housing repairs programme, 6,000 new council
houses, 4,000 new council jobs and no rate rises to compensate for
Tory/Liberal cuts". Significantly in Broadgreen, soon to be an area
for an historic victory for Marxism and Trotskyism, Labour’s vote
climbed by 50 per cent.

This result, which gave an enormous boost to
supporters of Militant, was the ideal dress-rehearsal for the 1983 General
Election. Thatcher seized the favourable conjuncture provided by the
victory in the Falklands to "go to the country" in June 1983.

A minimum of 200 canvassers were involved in
Broadgreen over weekends, with the average being 250. On election day 500
workers from Liverpool and other parts of the country worked in the
Broadgreen constituency. Few other campaigns had generated such commitment
and enthusiasm.

Only those of Pat Wall in Bradford North and Dave Nellist
in Coventry South East had brought forth a similar response. However, the
Labour right systematically sabotaged Pat Wall’s campaign. Terry Fields,
on the other hand, merely had to contend with the slanders of the Liberals
and the Tories. So effective was his campaign that the Liberal candidate
confessed that it was "unlike anything he’d seen in the country,
even in by-elections". (3)

Terry Fields spoke at more than ten factory gate
and canteen meetings. At a bin depot about 200 drivers waited from 6.30 am
to 7.30 am for a gate meeting before starting work. 2,000 gathered on 17
May for a North West Regional Labour Party rally at St George’s Hall,
where Michael Foot spoke alongside seven Labour parliamentary candidates.
Foot was compelled to hail the recent local election victory:

It was tremendous the way Liverpool has set the
standard in local elections just before the general election. It was very
fitting that just before we cleared the Tories out of Westminster, we,
here in Liverpool, should have such a wonderful success in the council
elections. (4)

Labour nationally received its lowest share in
the poll since 1935. Nevertheless the 1983 general election was not the
overwhelming triumph for Thatcher which historians claim. The popular vote
for the Tories fell by nearly two per cent, or 700,000 votes, compared to
1979. At the same time three million fewer workers voted Labour than in
1979. The capitalist inspired scheme for splitting the Labour vote had
partially succeeded. Disenchanted Tory voters and some Labour voters also
swung over to support the SDP/Liberal Alliance.

The right wing had effectively sabotaged Labour’s
campaign. Denis Healey and James Callaghan explicitly distanced themselves
from the manifesto commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Labour’s radical proposals were undermined when
the Labour leadership was incapable of answering the question: "How
will it be paid for?" Foot emphasised the need for borrowing,
devaluation and reinforced the impression that Labour intervenes to spend
its way out of a crisis. This raised the idea of a massive expansion in
public expenditure but without the economic base to sustain it.

The election results in Liverpool, however, stood
out in marked contrast to most other regions. Completely against the
national trend there was a swing to Labour in Liverpool of two per cent.
This, we commented, "was due in no small measure to the influence of
Militant supporters in that city, where Terry Fields was elected as MP in
Liverpool Broadgreen". (5)

Alongside Terry Fields in Parliament was Dave
Nellist, Labour MP for Coventry South East, who had also chalked up a
notable victory in the general election.

A moderate off his knees

In Parliament the working class found no better
representatives than Terry Fields and Dave Nellist. The bitterness, the
class loathing, which the majority of workers on Merseyside felt for the
Tory victors, was voiced in Terry Fields’s maiden speech in Parliament.

New members of the House of Commons are expected to introduce themselves,
heartily congratulate opposition speakers, and wish well to their retiring
or defeated constituency rivals. Such pleasantries were cast aside when
Terry Fields rose to speak.

He made it clear he was there to represent the
Liverpool workers. They had elected him to fight on their behalf, not to
go around congratulating the Tory enemy. He was there not to appeal to the
ruling class, but to express the real feelings of the working class
against the Tory government and the system they represented. His full
speech was printed in Militant and was widely circulated in the labour
movement both on Merseyside and nationally.

The general gloom that had descended on the
labour movement in Britain in the aftermath of Thatcher’s return to
power did not affect Militant supporters given the success in Liverpool
and in Coventry. And within a month of Thatcher’s victory Militant
featured a dispute at "Lady at Lord John" in Liverpool which was
to become a landmark in the struggle against sexual harassment at work.

This dispute became the basis for Lezli-Anne Barratt’s marvellous film
Business as Usual, starring Glenda Jackson, John Thaw and Cathy Tysone.
This dealt powerfully with the issue of the emerging power of
working-class women and their refusal to accept the conditions of the
past, including sexual harassment. Audrey White had been sacked after
protesting about sexual harassment of staff at the Liverpool branch of the
firm. Sexual harassment, Militant declared, was

a product of society’s attitude that women are
only a temporary workforce and that women’s real role in society is only
in relation to men and that men can treat women as goods and chattels in
the home and at work, an attitude that goes back as long as private
property has existed, from slavery to capitalism.

The "Lady at Lord
John" dispute helped a lot of men both in the unions and outside to
realise that sexual harassment is a class matter and cannot be fought by
individual women. (6)

A very successful picket was conducted outside
the shop which resulted in many women being brought over to trade unionism
as a result of this heroic struggle. Audrey White was actually removed
from the shop by police when she was dismissed and the company tried to
use the law to stop trade union action. The pickets were served with an
injunction, accusing them of molesting and conspiring to do damage under
the Tories’ anti-union laws.

But the pressure of public opinion which
had built up over the court action resulted in the right to picket being
endorsed. The management pulled back from using further legal measures for
fear that this would widen the dispute. Despite all the obstacles in their
path the strikers forced the company to re-employ Audrey White with back
pay and even a discount for union members was won. Militant commented:
"This dispute has not only been an education to the pickets and the
trade union movement but also to the four million unorganised shop and
office workers". (7)

Youth

At the same time there was gathering opposition
to the Tories’ Youth Training Scheme (YTS). Half a million youth were to
be subjected to industrial conscription at £25 a week. Dave Nellist in a
forceful maiden speech in the House of Commons, highlighted the gathering
opposition to the YTS. He ardently championed the rights of youth in the
nine years that he was in Parliament. In his speech he pointed out:

only one in ten of those leaving the fifth form
last summer have found work. In a city (Coventry) that was built on
engineering, only 243 out of 5,000 who left school this summer found
apprenticeships... I speak today as the youngest Labour member elected in
last month’s general election. That gives me a special responsibility in
this place to champion rights, and to give voice to, the hopes and
aspirations of millions of young workers.

Pointing to a switch in the attitude of the Tory
government towards youth he asked:

What changed the attitude of the Tory Party
during the past four years... the principle answer is the events of the
summer of 1981 - the riots on the streets of Liverpool, London, Manchester
and other major cities - a desperate action by tens of thousands of
teenagers to draw attention to the poverty, despair, demoralisation,
harassment and anger of being young and unemployed under a Tory
government...

Thousands of YOPsters have been recruited by the Labour
Party Young Socialists into membership of the Transport and General
Workers’ Union, the General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Workers’
Union and the National Union of Public Employees and into other
non-general trade unions...

I issue a warning to the government. Do not be
misled by the siren voices of the media into believing that somehow in the
1980s we are witnessing the creation of a right-wing generation of youth
or that the labour movement is demoralised or weak when faced with another
term of Tory rule...

Our labour produces the wealth, which the government’s
capitalist society squanders on useless weapons of nuclear destruction, on
tax cuts to the super-rich, on stockpiles of food at a time of growing
poverty and on keeping five million people unemployed. As, in the 1980s,
society approaches a crossroads, the socialist programme will gain
significant support. (8)

Back to Wembley

In September 1983, just four months after
Thatcher’s election victory, in organising another rally at Wembley,
Militant gave a stunning demonstration that despite all attacks it
remained a powerful and growing force.

Almost 3,000 workers and youth
packed the Wembley Conference Centre. In the year that had elapsed between
the Labour Movement Conference against the witch-hunt and this event,
Militant could now claim that "two Militant supporters spoke as
Labour MPs." Sitting alongside them on the platform was Derek Hatton,
soon to be a household name, who declared that now Liverpool would carry
out its promises of creating new jobs and building houses.

On behalf of
the Editorial Board, I reminded the audience that in the previous year the
Labour Party right wing had started the process of expelling the five
Militant Editorial Board members by saying ‘cut off the head of Militant
and the rest would die’. They had noticeably not made the same expulsion
threat "to people like Chapple [then leader of the EETPU and also the
current chairman of the TUC] for their anti-Labour Party statements."

But, the right had "only succeeded in expelling us back into the
movement." I called for "all who agreed with our policies to
join with Militant in transforming the labour movement to a powerful body
which could itself change the whole of society."

Other speakers included the inspirational Anton
Nilson, the legendary Swedish worker, who had become a pilot with the Red
Army during the Russian Revolution. Dave Nellist spoke, as did Terry
Fields who joked "that he had thought of turning up in disguise
because of the dangers of being associated with Militant".

Ted Grant,
representatives of the youth, and Micky Duffy from the Northern Ireland
Public Services Association (NIPSA) also spoke. One of the most
outstanding features of the rally was that £40,000 was promised for the
Militant Fighting Fund. (9)

Labour Party Conference

The very success of Militant was itself a reason
for the right wing to press ahead with the expulsion of the Editorial
Board members at the October 1983 Labour Party Conference at Brighton.
Against the background of huge TV and press coverage - which assumed the
proportions of a rugby scrum outside the conference hall - the five of us
were allowed into a closed session of conference to appeal against the NEC’s
decision to recommend their expulsion.

The right-wing officialdom went to
extraordinary and ludicrous lengths in order to prevent the five from
receiving any press publicity. They were ushered in through a back door
and asked to leave through a back door as well, an offer which we none too
politely refused. A Labour Party official rugby tackled a TV cameraman and
a well-known commentator in order to prevent us being filmed for the TV
News.

Compelled to give the five a hearing because of
the threat of transgressing the principles of "natural justice",
the Labour Party conference session dealing with the witch-hunt was a
farce. No court in the land would have allowed the defence first of all to
state its case before the prosecution outlined its charges. But this was
precisely the format adopted in dealing with our expulsion. We were
allowed five minutes each to make our "appeal".

Predictably the votes, which had already been
lined up by right-wing union general secretaries, were heavily in favour
of the platform’s recommendation for expulsions. But 80 per cent of the
delegates from the Constituency Labour Parties and a considerable number
of rank-and-file trade union delegates voted against expulsion. This was
all the more remarkable given the fact that the conference showed a
powerful urge for unity.

The election of Neil Kinnock as the new leader
and Roy Hattersley as his deputy seemed to many to point to a more
favourable period for Labour. While there was big support for Kinnock,
this was tempered with a determination on the part of the delegates not to
divide the movement. An extremely sympathetic attitude was shown in the
conference sessions and afterwards in private discussion towards the
Editorial Board members and other Militant supporters. With a mixture of
amusement and indignation the press and the Labour Party right wing
confronted the spectacle of the five Editorial Board members, the day
after their expulsion, sitting in the conference hall as Militant
representatives.

In the general euphoria surrounding the election
of Kinnock, Militant, virtually alone, struck a critical note. It warned
about the future consequences of a Kinnock leadership. Kinnock was the
perfect "left" screen, behind which the right could begin the
counter-revolution against the gains on policy and programme registered in
the period of 1979 to 1982.

A veiled counter-revolution by the right was
set in train soon after the election. The reselection of Labour MPs was to
be challenged by the right. All the conservative forces in the Labour
Party - the place men and women, self seekers, the party’s own
officialdom, and the union leadership - looked for a figure to front their
"counter-revolution".

Kinnock had been sounding out this layer
in the period before the election and in an energetic campaign for the
leadership afterwards. The support he got from the unions came from the
right and the nominal "left". Kinnock had all the necessary
attributes required by Labour’s conservative, privileged stratum of MPs,
councillors and the rest. He still claimed to be on the left, although he
had long since distanced himself from Benn and had voted for the expulsion
of the Militant Editorial Board in February 1983.

The election of Roy
Hattersley as leader, rather than deputy leader, would have complicated
the task of shifting the axis of the labour movement to the right.
Hattersley, at the Labour Party conference two years later, publicly
recognised this when he said that the party had chosen correctly when they
elected Kinnock in 1983! Hattersley is not known for false modesty!